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Jan 27, 2014Ghettoville’s return to some of the musical qualities of its 2008 predecessor gives new richness and power to Actress’s work.
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Jan 30, 2014R.I.P. suggesting a fitting final ceremony, where Ghettoville evokes Actress driven over the abyss, As an obituary, however, it’s a fittingly emotional, opaque and confounding conclusion for a project that has been an outlier amongst a scene of outliers from its inception.
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Jan 24, 2014Ghettoville is lonely and solipsistic, music for 3am and the glow of streetlamps and the distant reflections of glass and steel, of crumbling urbanity meshed with neon glow and shadows cast long and deep.
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Feb 20, 2014Actress brings about sounds from a fresh, fascinating, fucked up perspective.
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Feb 4, 2014Ghettoville is a purposefully secretive record, a vision quest, a Cassavetes lens--at times challenging to sit through, but the more you look into it, the more you might discover.
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Jan 31, 2014This is a record which exerts a demand upon everyone who listens to it, not simply in its abrasive textures but in the fundamental questions it raises about the worthwhileness of persevering.
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The WireJan 30, 2014Ghettoville feels dead, finished, hopeless. If this is, as the publicity hints, an end to the Actress project, then it is a dramatic one. [Feb 2014, p.44]
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Q MagazineJan 28, 2014Challenging yet compelling. [Feb 2014, p.110]
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Jan 28, 2014It's even bleaker, more industrial and decayed, than 2012's R.I.P. There are more moments of forward motion here than on that previous album. They're all captivating on some level.
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Jan 28, 2014It challenges, questions and, quite frequently, unnerves. Despite all of this, you can’t quite stop listening. It’s a record that leaves you frozen.
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Jan 27, 2014Mostly Ghettoville is an exciting new landscape to get lost in and explore, even if it does spell the end for Actress.
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Jan 27, 2014Ghettoville is a 70-minute high-wire act, equal parts musique concrète and concrete jungle, its enveloping darkness in tension with a few precious rays of light.
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Jan 24, 2014"R.I.P music," wrote Cunningham in the introduction to the album. As corpses go, this one is exquisite.
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Jan 24, 2014Although the dystopian vibe does brighten towards the climax, when Cunningham adds soulful vocal samples to his palette of ambient, industrial, techno, avant-electronica, glitch, minimalism and pretty much any other genre he feels like taking apart.
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UncutJan 24, 2014Inscrutable, unsettling and utterly unique. [Feb 2014, p.69]
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Jan 24, 2014Rarely has an artist’s death been so vivid. R.I.P. Actress; your dystopian electronic visions have widened our nocturnal vision. We now await your reincarnation.
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Jan 24, 2014Ghettoville might chronicle a dark patch for Actress, but once it hits its stride it’s as good, and as full of life, as anything he has produced.
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Mar 11, 2014This isn’t really a brisk stroll through a sunny countryside, but rather a nightly crawl through dank streets where moss consumes decaying cigarettes among the cobblestones and tombs.
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Jan 28, 2014An easy listen it isn't, but Ghettoville is full of such textural subtlety, rubbed-raw sound design and spatial aural play that it will leave you somewhat discombobulated yet curious for more.
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Jan 27, 2014Though his misses may make Ghettoville appear lopsided and drab, every on-point production buried in the heap makes mucking through Cunningham's warped ideas rewarding work.
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Jan 28, 2014Cunningham's perplexing persona has always been overshadowed by his ability to confound us with his records; Ghettoville, disappointingly, shifts that balance.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 15 out of 17
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Mixed: 2 out of 17
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Negative: 0 out of 17
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Apr 23, 2014